1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and article of manufacture for searching documents for ranges of numeric values.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the current art, a search engine, such as an Internet search engine, receives search request to locate all accessible documents, such as web pages, in a network, such as an Internet or Intranet, that satisfy a query. The search engine maintains posting lists for searchable words, terms, number, etc., where the posting list for a word comprises the document identifiers (docID) of all documents that include the word associated with the posting list. At periodic intervals, the search engine may execute web robots that search the Internet for documents. The robot determines the words in the document associated with posting lists and then adds the located document identifier, i.e., docID, to all posting lists associated with a word in the document.
When a user submits a request for multiple words, the search engine locates the posting lists for each word included in the search request and then returns the union of all document IDs in the posting lists if the search request is a Boolean OR search. If the search is an AND request, then the search engine returns the document IDs resulting from the intersection of the posting lists. Moreover, the query can also be an arbitrary expression, e.g. “A and B or C and not (D) and function (F, G).